Searching for New Sound - Music Composition ideas

(Following up from the last article of improvisation on an existing melody.) Toccata is a musical form for keyboard instruments, written in a freestyle or improvising on very limited material, mostly just a mode or scale, since the Renaissance period. It was used as a help for singers to find the right pitch and mode before the church service. It is quite virtuoso as well. I made a pure data gamelan patch that the program will randomly select the notes for the gamelan scale (D E F A Bb) (see more ). This is the only material for me to improvise to echo the random pattern of the PD patch. My source material is only the gamelan scale. My improvisation was based on the scale and adding notes around the scale to decorate and create contrasting sections. The beginning melody is decorated with chromatic neighboring notes of a center tone. The second section is based on Bb major scale. The third section is based on the pentatonic scale. The fourth section, on Bb major scale, I change the...

 Think about the concept of improvisation in Western music, the first thought possibly is jazz or a cadenza in concerto (although lots of late romantic composers wrote out the cadenza.) The practice of notation has been solid for centuries. The notation has been developed into more and more sophisticated. The general impression of western is all written out elaborately and has little room for performers to interpret. This contributed to the rise of the independent identity of "composer". The composer as the central figure of a piece has all the explicit control of all the details. Traced back to the Renaissance period, the score is definitely cleaner and did not offer so much detail that we would expect today. The role of a composer in that period was a musical material provider. In many cases, the role of composer and performer were hard to separate. Speaking of improvisation, there are different levels of it. How many materials provide for the performers? How much is the un...